The Dead Zone. Not the incredible 1979 Stephen King novel. Not the solid 1983 Christopher Walken movie. Not the "never saw it" early-2000's Anthony Michael Hall TV series.
The *RB* Dead Zone is real. It haunts managers, usually by midway through the season, when draft excitement is replaced by draft regret. You're picking in the sixth round with only one running back rostered. Only a few starting RBs are left. So you rationalize that it's better to lock in a #2 RB than to take the "best available player."
For example, if you were drafting in the middle of round 6 last summer, you might have decided between Aaron Jones (overall-67 ADP) and George Pickens (overall-68). In 2024, it might have been Zamir White (overall-66) vs. Terry McLaurin (overall-73). 2023 might have led you down the Dalvin Cook path (overall-60) or Drake London path (overall-65).
The idea of the Dead Zone is that after about 20 RBs are off the board, we're choosing among roughly three types of backs. One is post-prime guys clinging to fantasy relevance. Another is untested and mostly unheralded younger players with a leg up on a starting job. A third is a starter who's never been a weekly fantasy starter, so you're playing more for a high floor than a high ceiling. There are probably several other "types," but those are the prominent ones that come to mind.
Maybe once or twice over the years, I've tried to make sense of it on this page by sharing analytics from my "ADP vs. Scoring" spreadsheet. One of my favorite charts across all my research--something I'd consult continually each summer if I hadn't committed it to memory--is called "Preseason Rankings vs. Fantasy Points: 2012-Present." Using ADPs as a guidepost, it's a color-coated chart comparing average fantasy point totals for each position, broken down into groups of six.
For example, RBs 1-6 (based on ADPs since 2012) have averaged 232.5 points per game. WRs 1-6 have averaged 260.8. RBs 7-12 have averaged 222.9. And so on with into the final rounds of a somewhat typical draft, incorporating pretty much every "draftable" QB, RB, WR, TE, K, and DST. Some of you have requested access to this, so you know what I'm talking about.
One of the most interesting things to me about this chart is the shifting gap between RB tiers. There's a noticeable step-down between RBs 7-12 and RBs 13-18. Then another steep decline between RBs 13-18 and RBs 19-24. But then things level off beginning around the 5th-6th rounds, and it usually continues into the 10th-11th rounds. This is a graphical representation of the Dead Zone based purely on quantitative outcomes. It shows what many of us have experienced.
Last night I created a new chart to try to understand this phenomenon from a different perspective. We already know (or at least, I've talked about it before here and/or on the podcast) that older running backs are more likely to underperform ADP expectations than younger running backs. Basically, the market tends to overvalue post-prime players and undervalue pre-prime players. So if we apply players' ages to this chart, what happens? Does it clarify how we might predict when to steer clear of the Dead Zone?
I isolated for the average age of all ADP RB1s, all RB2s, etc., all the way up to RB50. There are 14 players in each group, because this data goes back 14 seasons because pre-2012 ADP data isn't reliable). So that's 700 total players -- a pretty good data set for this kind of research -- broken down into 50 ADP groups. This isn't about "randomly" assigning values to RBs 1-6, RBs 7-12, etc. This is about measuring each ADP rank and comparing it to every other rank.
What I found is that eight of the 18 oldest RB groups are in the RB22-RB30 range. In other words, of the nine groups in this range (22, 23, . . . 30), eight are among the oldest in the whole 50-group set. Another way of looking at it: 44% of the "average oldest RBs" in this set are contained in section accounting for only 18% of the total players. That "section" happens to coincide with a big chunk of the Dead Zone. These are, on average, relatively old players. So of course -- based on everything else we know -- they're more likely (on average) to fall short of ADP expectations.
If we expand the range of the Dead Zone to include RBs taken roughly in the 7th-8th rounds, the data is even more compelling. RB groups 22 thru 37 -- 16 of the 50 total ADP groups (32%) -- account for 12 of the 18 oldest average players (67%). The market is lumping a lot of relatively old RBs into this Dead Zone space.
The top-10 preseason RBs -- who are mostly younger across the board -- on average finish 21st among RB fantasy scorers. The ADP top 11-21 preseason RBs on average finish 28th. But RBs 22-30 -- the next "tier" -- on average finish 41st. That's a huge drop, and it's reflected in the chart I highlighted earlier. And then the leveling out . . . RBs 31-37 (with a bunch of older RBs) on average finish 46th . . . the next 10 groups (RBs 38-47) are on average nearly a year younger than the 22-30 and 31-37 groups. These RB 38-47 players on average finish 49th.
So when we draft in the Dead Zone, we're picking relatively old running backs (on average, not always) who perform only marginally better than guys we could draft five, six, seven rounds later. And if you subscribe to my rankings, you can see why I'm as bullish as ever about 29-year-old David Montgomery (RB23 ADP) being a massive fade, while Year 2 teammate Woody Marks (RB43) is a nice bargain. Their overall ADPs are separated by 73 players. They're getting picked about five rounds apart.
Simply put, Montgomery represents the Dead Zone. Marks represents the almost comparable value you can find much later in your draft.
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